A moment of Zen

Back in the day — and that day was when I was a resident at the San Francisco Zen Center, robed and meditating in the early ’90s — I remember happening upon a couple of relevant descriptions regarding the nature of attaining enlightenment.

One of them I made up, and I’ll tell you about it personally because it’s too lengthy to go into here. The other one went something like this (and I’m paraphrasing here): Enlightenment is like walking in a mist and eventually finding, while you walk, that you’re soaked to the skin.

Now that you’re at the third paragraph, you’re asking yourself, “That’s . . . um . . . nice, Larry, but what does that have to do with Linux or FOSS?”

Simple: Yesterday, I wrote that 2011 was not the year of the Linux desktop, and that it would come eventually.

I was wrong about this.

The fact of the matter is that every year the Linux/FOSS community has been walking through the mist of the acceptance — arguably, approaching the embrace — of the Linux desktop until now we find ourselves soaked in it.

So the year of the Linux desktop is already here, just as it has always been here.

(Fedora ambassador Larry Cafiero runs Redwood Digital Research in Felton, California, and is an associate member of the Free Software Foundation.)